I am neurodivergent and noticed the Youtube Shorts format was hacking my brain to engage longer than I wanted. I wrote this quick extension to gain my time back. If you have suggestions for improvement, I'm all ears. Thank you :)
Note that YouTube Shorts are just normal YouTube videos on a different URL. This means you can take a link to a Shorts like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<id>" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<id></a> and change it to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<id>" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<id></a>.<p>This way, you won't get the dreaded doomscroll interface, and you can also scrub through the video!
If you use uBlock Origin, you can also just hide them: <a href="https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts">https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts</a>
I have an even more radical solution. Whenever I have to watch something on yt (because I was sent a link to it), I download the video using yt-dlp and watch the downloaded video. I never ever go on the website :-)
Neat!<p>There's also Redirector, which allows to do all kinds of redirects like this. For example, I use it to redirect from YouTube to Invidious or from Booking.com confirmation page to the variant without upsells (which are otherwise tricky to block with uBlock Origin).<p><a href="http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/" rel="nofollow">http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/</a><p>My rules: <a href="https://gist.github.com/notpushkin/ee1ed3aa55a0926708d0de854c7e5482" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/notpushkin/ee1ed3aa55a0926708d0de854...</a>
There's a user script version of that here as well for mobile browsers. You need to install Tapermonkey first or Userscript app for Macintosh.
<a href="https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redirect" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...</a>
Shorts make me really mad. I use this Chrome extension to remove everything related to Shorts: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-shorts/aljlkinhomaaahfdojalfmimeidofpih" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-short...</a>
I use a very manual mode on Safari (my default browser) - once very month, I click the "X" besides the Shorts Carousal and it works until the next time, then I repeat.<p>Disclaimer: I'm not that into YouTube and kinda 'lucky-priced' to be in a region-discounted part of the world.
Youtube lite is also a time saving alternative worth to check. The only down side is you have to have your own api keys though.<p>- <a href="https://youtube-lite.js.org" rel="nofollow">https://youtube-lite.js.org</a>